“I can cope with that.” Paulette made a lazy right turn and slid into the slow-moving stream of traffic. “Don’t feel like cooking?”
“I’ve got to have a shower,” said Miriam. “Then I’ve got a weekend of stuff to put in the washing machine, several hundred pictures to download and index, memos to load into the computer, and an explanation. If you figure I can do all that and a pot roast too, then you don’t know me as well as I think you do.”
“That,” Paulette remarked as she pulled over into the parking space next to Miriam’s house, “was a very mixed metaphor.”
“Don’t listen to what I say; listen to what I mean, okay?”
“I get the picture. Dinner’s on you.”
After half an hour in the bathroom, Miriam felt human, if not entirely dry. She stopped in her bedroom for long enough to find some clean clothes, then headed downstairs in her bare feet.
Paulette had parked herself in the living room with a couple of mugs of coffee and an elegant-looking handbag. She raised an eyebrow at Miriam: “You look like you’ve been dry-cleaned. Was it that bad?”
“Yeah.” Miriam settled down on the sofa, then curled her legs up beneath her. She picked up one of the mugs and inhaled deeply. “Ah, that’s better.”
“Ready to tell me what the hell is going on?”
“In a moment.” Miriam closed her eyes, then gathered up the strands of still-damp hair sticking to her neck and wound them up, outside her collar. “That’s better. It happened right after they screwed us over, Paulie. I figured you’d think I’d gone off the deep end if I just told you about it, which is why I didn’t call you back the same day. Why I asked you to drive. Sorry about the surprise.”
“You should be: I spent an hour in the woods looking for you. I nearly called the police twice, but you’d said precisely when you’d be back and I thought they’d think I was the one who was nuts. ‘Sides, you’ve got a habit of dredging up weird shit and leaving me to pick up the pieces. Promise me there are no gangsters in this one?”
“I promise.” Miriam nodded. “Well, what do you think?”
“I think I’d like some lemon chicken. Sorry.” Paulette grinned impishly at Miriam’s frown. “Okay, I believe you’ve discovered something very weird indeed. I actually videoed you vanishing into thin air in front of the camera! And when you appeared again-no, I didn’t get it on tape, but I saw you out of the corner of my eye. Either we’re both crazy or this is for real.”
“Madness doesn’t come in this shape and size,” Miriam said soberly. She winced. “I need a painkiller.” She rubbed her feet, which were cold. “You know I’m adopted, right? My mother didn’t quite tell me everything until Monday. I went to see her after we were fired…”
For the next hour Miriam filled Paulette in on the events of the past week, leaving out nothing except her phone call to Andy. Paulette listened closely and asked the right questions. Miriam was satisfied that her friend didn’t think she was mad, wasn’t humouring her. “Anyway, I’ve now got tape of my vanishing, a shitload of photographs of this village, and dictated notes. See? It’s beginning to mount up.”
“Evidence,” said Paulette. “That would be useful if you want to go public.” Suddenly she looked thoughtful. “Big if there.”
“Hmm?” Miriam drank down what was left of her coffee.
“Well, this place you go to-it’s either in the past or the future, or somewhere else, right? I think we can probably rule out the past or future options. If it was the past, you wouldn’t have run across a village the way you described it; and as for the future, there’d still be some sign of Boston, wouldn’t there?”
“Depends how far in the future you go.” Miriam frowned. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s funny; when I was a little girl I always figured the land of make-believe would be bright and colourful. Princesses in castles and princes to go around kissing them so they turned into frogs-and dragons to keep the royalty population under control. But in the middle ages there were about a thousand peasants living in sordid poverty for every lord of the manor, who actually had a sword, a horse, and a house with a separate bedroom to sleep in. A hundred peasants for every member of the nobility-the lords and their families-and the same for every member of the merchant or professional classes.”
“Sounds grimly real to me, babe. Forget Hollywood. Your map was accurate, wasn’t it?”
“What are you getting at? You’re thinking about… What was that show called: Sliders’! Right?”
“Alternate earths. Like on TV.” Paulette nodded. “I only watched a couple of episodes, but… well. Suppose you are going sideways, to some other earth where there’s nobody but some medieval peasants. What if you, like, crossed over next door to a bank, walked into exactly where the vault would be in our world, waited for the headache to go away, then crossed back again?”
“I’d be inside the bank vault, wouldn’t I? Oh”
“That, as they say, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Paulette commented dryly. “Listen, this is going to be a long session. I figure you haven’t thought all the angles through. What were you planning on doing with it?”
“I-I’m.” Miriam stopped. “I told you about the phone call.”
Paulette looked at her bleakly. “Yeah. Did I tell you-”
“You too?”
She nodded. ‘The evening after I told them to go fuck themselves. Don’t know who it was: I hung up on him and called the phone company, told them it was a nuisance call, but they couldn’t tell me anything.”
“Bastards.”
“Yes. Listen. When I was growing up in Providence, there were these guys… it wasn’t a rich neighbourhood, but they always had sharp suits. Momma told me never to cross them-or, even talk to them. Trouble is, when they talk to you-I think I need a drink. What do you say?”
“I say there’re a couple of bottles in the cabinet,” said Miriam, massaging her forehead. “Don’t mind if I join you.”
Coffee gave way to a couple of modest glasses of Southern Comfort. “It’s a mess,” said Paulette. “You, uh-we didn’t talk about Monday. Did we?”
“No,” Miriam admitted. “If you want to just drop it and forget the whole business, I’m not going to twist your arm.” She swallowed. She felt acutely uneasy, as if the whole comfortable middle-class professional existence she’d carved out for herself was under retreat. Like the months when she’d subliminally sensed her marriage decaying, never quite able to figure out exactly what was wrong until…
“ ‘Drop it?’” Paulette’s eyes flashed, a momentary spark of anger. “Are you crazy? These hard men, they’re really easy to understand. If you back down, they own you. It’s simple as that. That’s something I learned when I was a kid.”
“What happened-” Miriam stopped.
Paulie tensed, then breathed out, a long sigh. “My parents weren’t rich,” she said quietly. “Correction: They were poor as pigshit. Gramps was a Sicilian immigrant, and he hit the bottle. Dad stayed on the wagon but never figured out how to get out of debt. He held it together for Mom and us kids, but it wasn’t easy. Took me seven years to get through college, and I wanted a law degree so bad I could taste it. Because lawyers make lots of money, that’s numero uno. And for seconds, I’d be able to tell the guys Dad owed where to get off.”
Miriam leaned forward to top off her glass.
“My brother Joe didn’t listen to what Momma told us,” Paulette said slowly. “He got into gambling, maybe a bit of smack. It wasn’t the drugs, but one time he tried to argue with the bankers. They held him down and used a cordless drill on both his kneecaps.”
“Uh.” Miriam felt a little sick. “What happened?”
“I got as far as being a paralegal before I figured out there’s no point getting into a job where you hate the guts of everybody you have to work with, so I switched track and got a research gig. No journalism degree, see, so I figured I’d work my way up. Oh, you meant to Joe? He OD’d on heroin. It wasn’t an a
ccident-it was the day after they told him he’d never walk again.” She said it with the callous disregard of long-dead news, but Miriam noticed her knuckles tighten on her glass. “That’s why I figure you don’t want to ever let those guys notice you. But if they do, you don’t ever back off.”
“That’s-I’m really sorry. I had no idea.”
“Don’t blame yourself.” Paulette managed an ironic smile. “I, uh, took a liberty with the files before I printed them.” She reached inside her handbag and flipped a CD-ROM at Miriam.
“Hey, what’s this?” Miriam peered at the greenish silver surface.
“It’s the investigation.” Paulie grinned at her. “I got everything before you decided to jump Sandy ’s desk and get Joe to take an unhealthy interest in us.”
“But that’s stealing!” Miriam ended on a squeak.
“And what do you call what they did to your job?” Paulette asked dryly. “I call this insurance.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh. I don’t think they know about it-otherwise we’d be in way deeper shit already. Still, you should find somewhere to hide it until we need it.”
Miriam looked at the disk as if it had turned into a snake. “Yeah, I can do that.” She drained her glass, then picked up the disk and carried it over to the stereo. “Gotcha.” She pulled a multidisk CD case from the shelf, opened it, and slid the extra disk inside. “The Beggar’s Opera. Think you can remember that?”
“Oh! Why didn’t I think of doing that?”
“Because.” Miriam grinned at her. “Why didn’t I think of burning that disk in the first place?”
“We each need a spare brain.” Paulette stared at her. “Listen, that’s problem number one. What about problem number two? This crazy shit from another world. What were you messing around with it for?”
Miriam shrugged. “I had some idea that I could hide from the money laundry over there,” she said slowly. “Also, to tell the truth, I wanted someone else to tell me I wasn’t going crazy. But going totally medieval isn’t going to answer my problem, is it?”
“I wouldn’t say so.” Paulette put her glass down, half-empty. “Where were we? Oh yeah. You cross over to the other side, wherever that is, and you wander over to where your bank’s basement is, then you cross back again. What do you think happens?”
“I come out in a bank vault.” Miriam pondered. “They’re wired inside, aren’t they? After my first trip I was a total casualty, babe. I mean, projectile vomiting-” she paused, embarrassed. “A fine bank robber I’d make!”
“There is that,” said Paulette. “But you’re not thinking it through. What happens when the alarm goes off?”
“Well. Either I go back out again too fast and risk an aneurism or…” Miriam trailed off. “The cops show and arrest me.”
“And what happens after they arrest you?”
“Well, assuming they don’t shoot first and ask questions later, they cuff me, read me my rights, and haul me off to the station. Then book me in and stick me in a cell.”
“And then?” Paulette rolled her eyes at Miriam’s slow uptake.
“Why, I call my lawyer-” Miriam stopped, eyes unfocused. “No, they’d take my locket,” she said slowly.
“Sure. Now, tell me. Is it your locket or is it the pattern in your locket? Have you tested it? If it’s the design, what if you’ve had it tattooed on the back of your arm in the meantime?” Paulette asked.
“That’s-” Miriam shook her head. “Tell me there’s a flaw in the logic.”
“I’m not going to do that.” Paulette picked up the bottle and waved it over Miriam’s glass in alcoholic benediction. “I think you’re going to have to test it tomorrow to find out. And I’m going to have to test it, to see if it works for me-if that’s okay by you,” she added hastily. “If it’s the design, you just got your very own ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. Doesn’t matter if you can’t use it to rob bank vaults, there’s any number of other scams you can run if you can get out of the fix instantaneously. Say, uh, you walk into a bank and pull a holdup. No need for a gun, just pass over a note saying you’ve got a bomb and they should give you all the money. Then, instead of running away, you head for the staff rest room and just vanish into thin air.”
“You have got a larcenous mind, Paulie.” Miriam shook her head in awe. “You’re wasted in publishing.”
“No, I’m not.” Paulette frowned seriously. “Y’see, you haven’t thought this through. S’pose you’ve got this super power. Suppose nobody else can use it-we can try me out tomorrow, huh? Do the experiment with the photocopy of the locket on you, then try me. See if I can do it. I figure it’s going to be you, and not me, because if just anybody could do it it would be common knowledge, huh? Or your mother would have done it. For some reason somebody stabbed your mother and she didn’t do it. So these must be some kind of gotcha. But anyway. What do you think the cops would make of it if instead of robbing banks or photographing peasant villagers you, uh, donated your powers to the forces of law and order?”
“Law and order consists of bureaucracies,” Miriam said with a brisk shake of her head. “You’ve seen all those tedious FBI press conferences I sat in on when they were lobbying for carnivore and crypto export controls, huh?” A vision unfolded behind her eyes, the poisonous fire blossom of an airliner striking an undefended skyscraper. “Jesus, Paulie, imagine if Al Qaida could do this!”
“They don’t need it: They’ve got suicide volunteers. But yeah, there are other bad guys who… if you can see it, so can the feds. Remember that feature about nuclear terrorism that Zeb ran last year? How the NIRT units and FEMA were able to track bombs as they come in across the frontier if there’s an alert on?”
“I don’t want to go there.” The thought made Miriam feel physically ill. “There is no way in hell I’d smuggle a nuclear weapon across a frontier.”
“No.” Paulette leaned forward, her eyes serious: “But if you have this ability, who else might have it? And what could they do with it? There are some very scary, dangerous national security implications here, and if you go public the feds will bury you so deep-”
“I said I don’t want to go there,” Miriam repeated. “Listen, this is getting deeply unfunny. You’re frightening me, Paulie, more than those assholes with their phone calls and their handle on the pharmaceutical industry. I’m wondering if maybe I should sleep with a gun under my pillow.”
“Get frightened fast, babe; it’s your ass we’re talking about. I’ve had two days to think about your vanishing trick and our goodfella problem, and I tell you, you’re still thinking like an honest journalist, not a paranoid. Listen, if you want to clean up, how about the crack trade? Or heroin? Go down to Florida, get the right connections, you could bring a small dinghy over and stash it on the other side, no problems-it’d just take you a while, a few trips maybe. Then you could carry fifty, a hundred kilos of coke. Sail it up the coast, then up the Charles. Bring it back over right in the middle of Cambridge, out of fucking nowhere without the DEA or the cops noticing. They say one in four big shipments gets intercepted-that’s bullshit-but maybe one in five, one in eight… you could smuggle the stuff right under their noses in the middle of a terrorist scare. And I don’t know whether you’d do that or not-my guess is not, you’ve got capital-P principles-but that is the first thing the cops will think of.”
“Hell.” Miriam stared into the bottom of her glass, privately aghast. “What do you suggest?”
Paulette put her own glass down. “Speaking as your legal adviser, I advise you to buy guns and move fast. Mail the disk to another newspaper and the local FBI office, then go on a long cruise while the storm breaks. That-and take a hammer to the locket and smash it up past recognition.”
Miriam shook her head, then winced. “Oh, my aching head. I demand a second opinion. Where is my recount, dammit?”
“Well.” Paulette paused. “You’ve made a good start on the documentation. We can see if it’s just you, run the experiments, r
ight? I figure the clincher is if you can carry a second person through. If you can do that, then not only do you have documents, you’ve got witnesses. If you go public, you want to do so with a splash-so widespread that they can’t put the arm on you. They’ve got secret courts and tame judges to try national security cases, but if the evidence is out in the open they can’t shut you up, especially if it’s international. I’d say Canada would be best.” She paused again, a bleak look in her eye. “Yeah, that might work.”
“You missed something.” Miriam stabbed a finger in Paulette’s direction. “You. What do you get?”
“Me?” Paulette covered her heart with one hand, pulled a disbelieving face. “Since when did I get a vote?”
“Since, hell, since I got you into this mess. I figure I owe you. Noblesse oblige. You’re a friend, and I don’t drop friends in it, even by omission.”
“Friendship and fifty cents will buy you a coffee.” Paulie paused for a moment, then grinned. “But I’m glad, all the same.” Her smile faded. “I didn’t get the law job.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Will you stop doing that? Every chance you get to beat yourself up for getting me fired, you’re down on your knees asking for forgiveness!”
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize it was getting on your nerves,” Miriam said contritely.
“Fuck off!” Paulette giggled. “Pardon my French. Anyway. Think about what I said. Tomorrow you can mail that disk to the FBI if you want, then go on a long vacation. Or stick around and we’ll work on writing a story that’ll get you the Pulitzer. You can catch all the bullets from the goodfella hit men while I’ll be your loyal little gofer, get myself a star-spangled reference and a few points of the gross. Like, fifty percent. Deal?”
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